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Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson
avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."
That's part of competing -- to give your customers EVERY reason to pick you over someone else. Any good business does it by:
1. Providing a product that meets the current needs of their customers.
2. Providing a path to new features/efficiencies for their customers' futures.
3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely.
4. Providing a proven ROI for a short-term and long-term focus.
Microsoft, to me, is not a monopoly -- except when the State is involved (providing patents and copyrights and trademarks). I'm against those monopoly provisions, but those are "legal" ones. Without them, Microsoft's power over competitors would be equalized. You can't blame Microsoft for taking advantage of what you, the voters, allowed them to utilize. The judgements against them calling them a monopoly are only there because you, the voters, let those policies become standard based on Microsoft's given legal priviledge over competition. Nothing prevents competition from doing what Microsoft does -- except than the competition would rather use THEIR monkeys in government to try to stem Microsoft's growth.
As we see in the relatively free and unencumbered market of the web, Microsoft doesn't have any sort of monopoly -- people are free to choose what they want, and they do. In fact, the long tail effect shows that many products openly compete with Microsoft -- both legally obtained products and illegally obtained ones.
The whole Vista issue is a non-issue. Everyone who cries foul against Microsoft refuses to see that the products they prefer just don't meet the top 4 items I listed -- in fact, some of them fail most or all of them. No one will invest in a product, even a free one, if it doesn't offer those items. Many Microsoft products do -- but not all of them. Vista will succeed only because consultants will like its standardization, manufacturers will like knowing there is a standard interface for their hardware/software to run on, and resellers will like it because it has always worked well enough for both the casual and the power user.
Who cares about it looking like past products? If it worked for Microsoft in the past, why wouldn't they follow through with similar performances -- and making new ones to try to produce a better selling product?
Hmm, I don't want to sound any less stupid than I really am, but other than people using some signature on their Usenet mails, anyone can really make themselves appear to be anyone else on Usenet don't they? I've known these kinds in *cough* less respectable places, where they would get annoyed by the group, then suddenly prove they got no life and spam the heck out of the place with semi-plausible stuff, named against the member that pissed them off or simply ripping out the place.
... well ... forever ;)
Not making an apology, just saying it's a possibility. Then I haven't followed the drama there, so can't tell. I find his articles well written, with an obvious agenda, and repeatingly hitting the nail until we're tired of hearing about that point of view in long rants on nearly the same topic. Interesting point of view. I just wonder what that guy does because he surely got a lot of spare time since
Factual errors aside, I think he's trying to say:
Microsoft announced it had big things in development, didn't quite release all of the things they announced. This is fraud. Microsoft bad. They did it on purpose, by design. We're onto you guys, you won't fool us with Vista!
He references The Mythical Man-Month as if this would give him some kind of software development street cred. I don't buy it, mainly because he doesn't seem to have ever been involved with any software development project.
Many software projects start with ambitious and optimistic sets of features. And by many, I mean all. The bigger the project, the more ambitious the scope. "Yeah! Our next generation Operating System is going to have an OBJECT FILE SYSTEM and DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS and JUST IN TIME COMPILATION and ADAPTIVE HEALING and ADVANCED AI COMMAND INTERFACE and VOICE RECOGNITION. The future is NOW! We're awesome!" Developers believe the hype and do a lot to generate it. And if they believe it, and they're implementing the fucking thing, what chance do marketers have of looking at it critically? None. So they tow the line.
Result? The ambitious wildly impractical story is impossible to keep quiet. Sure, you can certainly fault companies for announcing features well before they're release candidate quality, but ambitious features getting cut because project deadlines are slipping happens all the time. Aside from the bad press that's generated from missing your release date, and the investment you blew developing features which don't get commercialized, there aren't many other downsides. If you can afford it, who cares?
I can totally imagine cutting these features if I were the project manager and we missed our release date; the decision process would go something like this: what is the most expensive feature we're developing right now that has the lowest return on investment that if we cut, would allow us to release much earlier? "Object filesystem" probably makes the top of everyone's list. It gets cut it in a heartbeat. What, was marketing hyping the shit out of it this whole time? I hadn't noticed, because I haven't left my cubicle in 36 months. Tough it out, marketing clowns.
What did Windows 95 actually add? The only thing I can think of is Win32, but really, even Microsoft seems to be admitting this isn't a lot -- they are giving away free upgrades to XP 64-bit to anyone with a legit 32-bit copy of XP Pro.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Are you kidding? Windows 3.x was essentially a DOS extender and was probably the most unstable, widely sold operating system of all time. Even Microsofties heaped scorn upon it afterwards. It was based on cooperative MT, not preemptive MT. Critical GUI resources were limited to 64K on a systemwide basis. Many users were force to reboot several times a day because of an "Unrecoverable Application Error". Interprocess communication and component integration relied on a succession of convoluted "technologies" (really just hacks): DDE, OLE1, and OLE2 Compound Documents. Microsoft had a huge edge over its rivals in application software because it knew the quirks of its own OS better than anyone else, and BEFORE anyone else, so they could workaround problems and take advantage of more robust and performant paths in the API.
Windows 95 was a major improvement, but was still a far cry from a robust operating system. (The Mac was no better in terms of stability, although it had a much more useable UI). Yes, there was Windows NT, but that was marketed to corporations and wasn't backwardly compatible with DOS applications. Stable, widely adopted consumer OS's didn't appear until after 2000, when Microsoft released Windows XP and Apple came out with OS X.
Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. It is leveraging the monopoly in an anti-competitive manner that is illegal.
Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.
But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.
And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.
Calling RoughlyDrafted a spammer is ridiculous.
... did he write an unflattering article about you or your pet company at some point?
The dude writes a blog and submits articles to Digg and other sites, and plenty of other people submit his articles because he's a great writer, even if you can't agree with every idea he has. He writes about topics other news sites skirt and avoid. He also presents an interesting historical viewpoint based on working in tech for a long time.
Read comments on his site, and its the ignorant 15 year old Xbox fanboys who attack him, while the aged veterans of the tech say he gets everything right. Lots of sources, refers to other writers, and is sometimes very funny. Sometimes over the top, but he is worthy to read.
As a webhost, I know he's not making anything significant with a few iTunes ads and some Amazon links on the side. Every website from CNET to Digg has far more ads all over, let along the Mac related news/trivia/rumors websites.
It says something that you bring out the big guns of "spammer conspiracy"